Greetings and welcome to another enlightening post by tvC's very own Señior Photographía. It has come to my attention that many of you, my loyal friends and followers, would like to know exactly how I do what I do. Today we will cover part of my digital image workflow, from card to internet output. As this is a fairly lengthy post please hit the link below to see the full article...
First thing is first. Get out there and capture some images. I almost always shoot RAW files that I convert to .dng (digital negative file) when I import them from the card, my custom metadata template is also applied at this time (all of my copyright info etc.). How you organize your digital negatives is up to you, but I do recommend figuring out a system that works for you and sticking to it. I import my images to a folder named with the date the images were captured. I keep all these folders in the same place on an external harddrive.
Next all files are batch-renamed to fit my archiving method which looks like this
mahoney_yyyymmdd_unique 4 digit serial number. See below...
Let me address some technical stuff. I use a Photoshop/Bridge workflow; however, the following can be applied to Lightroom with little modification, probably Aperture and just about any other high-end image editing program out there (I can't speak for CaptureOne however).
A common problem/task I deal with in my photography is getting large numbers of photos edited, watermarked, resized and uploaded to various websites in a fairly short amount of time. I will use Electric Kingdom (a far out discotec party I shoot every month) as an example.
On a typical night I show up at the club and shoot the DJ's, performers and crowd for about 5 hours. The next morning I have to get those images online for participants to see, complete with an Electric Kingdom bug in the corner, some sharpening/contrast and in a web friendly size/format. ('Bug' is a term used in television for the station identifier that displays in the bottom corner).
My charge is to pick my top 200ish images (from about 600-800 images average) to be placed in a Facebook album on the EK page. This part is easy, I simply go through the images in bridge and star the ones I like, discarding ones with technical problems or that are too similar to another photo etc. it's just basic editing.
This is the same for any event I cover, the only difference is that the number of images delivered varies.
After I am happy with my selections I filter the raw image folder to show just my selected photos and run through them again tagging the ones that might need a little exposure or composition help (usually about 10-20 images) I then open them in Camera Raw and do some quick edits.
Next I filter the folder to show only my selections and run them through a pre-built series of actions in Photoshop via Dr. Brown's 1-2-3 image processor. For those of you who don't know Dr. Russell Brown is a programer who writes file management scripts for Adobe programs, most of which (including the 1-2-3 image processor) are free. If you don't use this as a major part of your workflow you need to Dr. Brown changed my life. Check out his scripts page here.
Above is what the Dr. Brown's window looks like. You are presented with the option of where to save the processed files, and what type of file to save them as. The really nice thing about this batch processor is that you can save images as three different types in one go. You pick the colorspace and pixel dimensions as well. If you have any actions built in Photoshop they can be applied and your current copyright info is applied to the description of the image.
All that is left to do is hit run, let your computer do the hard/tedious work while you sit there drinking coffee.
In this case, I only need the images to be web ready so I only need to save them once, everything else is grayed out.
When I shoot EK I will also run my action that applies the Bug and some sharpening/contrast
Finally, upload the folder of completed images to Facebook, Dropbox, a blog or wherever you want.
But wait, that wasn't enough of a description for you? What about these Actions you speak of? How should an image be saved to be web ready?
Read on O Ye Faithful and be enlightened...
Check the right side of your Photoshop window for a palette that looks something like this. If you don't see the Actions tab then find it in the Window drop-down menu on the top of the screen. Actions are a great way to save time on things you do a lot in Photoshop. Basically you can record your keystrokes and play them back to any image you want. I use them for lots of things, but for the purposes of this demo, the action I have built adds some sharpening/contrast and the EK Bug. See detail below...
Once you have built an action to your needs, you can use it from Dr. Browns instead of having to open each individual file in Photoshop and apply the action, resize for web and save for the same.
The combination of Dr. Browns and Actions is a deadly one indeed. If you don't use actions, start. They are a huge time saver once you spend the time to build them.
Next let's talk about what it means to be web ready...
Through lot's of trial and error, asking around etc. I have found the following formula to work really well for me...
Jpeg, quality 10 at 72 ppi. sRGB color space and 1000 pixels on the long side. All these options are available for you in the Dr. Brown's 1-2-3 window.
For print-ready try...
Jpeg, quality 12 at 300 ppi. AdobeRGB colorspace and don't constrain the pixel dimensions.
Well that's about it for now. I use the same Dr. Brown's workflow weather I am converting 10 carefully crafted images for a blog post or 200 quickly edited photos for a client. Get on the Dr. Brown's bandwagon and change your life too. Any questions/comments are greatly appreciated and will be answered asap. Sound off in the comments.
First thing is first. Get out there and capture some images. I almost always shoot RAW files that I convert to .dng (digital negative file) when I import them from the card, my custom metadata template is also applied at this time (all of my copyright info etc.). How you organize your digital negatives is up to you, but I do recommend figuring out a system that works for you and sticking to it. I import my images to a folder named with the date the images were captured. I keep all these folders in the same place on an external harddrive.
Next all files are batch-renamed to fit my archiving method which looks like this
mahoney_yyyymmdd_unique 4 digit serial number. See below...
Let me address some technical stuff. I use a Photoshop/Bridge workflow; however, the following can be applied to Lightroom with little modification, probably Aperture and just about any other high-end image editing program out there (I can't speak for CaptureOne however).
A common problem/task I deal with in my photography is getting large numbers of photos edited, watermarked, resized and uploaded to various websites in a fairly short amount of time. I will use Electric Kingdom (a far out discotec party I shoot every month) as an example.
On a typical night I show up at the club and shoot the DJ's, performers and crowd for about 5 hours. The next morning I have to get those images online for participants to see, complete with an Electric Kingdom bug in the corner, some sharpening/contrast and in a web friendly size/format. ('Bug' is a term used in television for the station identifier that displays in the bottom corner).
My charge is to pick my top 200ish images (from about 600-800 images average) to be placed in a Facebook album on the EK page. This part is easy, I simply go through the images in bridge and star the ones I like, discarding ones with technical problems or that are too similar to another photo etc. it's just basic editing.
This is the same for any event I cover, the only difference is that the number of images delivered varies.
After I am happy with my selections I filter the raw image folder to show just my selected photos and run through them again tagging the ones that might need a little exposure or composition help (usually about 10-20 images) I then open them in Camera Raw and do some quick edits.
Next I filter the folder to show only my selections and run them through a pre-built series of actions in Photoshop via Dr. Brown's 1-2-3 image processor. For those of you who don't know Dr. Russell Brown is a programer who writes file management scripts for Adobe programs, most of which (including the 1-2-3 image processor) are free. If you don't use this as a major part of your workflow you need to Dr. Brown changed my life. Check out his scripts page here.
Above is what the Dr. Brown's window looks like. You are presented with the option of where to save the processed files, and what type of file to save them as. The really nice thing about this batch processor is that you can save images as three different types in one go. You pick the colorspace and pixel dimensions as well. If you have any actions built in Photoshop they can be applied and your current copyright info is applied to the description of the image.
All that is left to do is hit run, let your computer do the hard/tedious work while you sit there drinking coffee.
In this case, I only need the images to be web ready so I only need to save them once, everything else is grayed out.
When I shoot EK I will also run my action that applies the Bug and some sharpening/contrast
Finally, upload the folder of completed images to Facebook, Dropbox, a blog or wherever you want.
But wait, that wasn't enough of a description for you? What about these Actions you speak of? How should an image be saved to be web ready?
Read on O Ye Faithful and be enlightened...
Check the right side of your Photoshop window for a palette that looks something like this. If you don't see the Actions tab then find it in the Window drop-down menu on the top of the screen. Actions are a great way to save time on things you do a lot in Photoshop. Basically you can record your keystrokes and play them back to any image you want. I use them for lots of things, but for the purposes of this demo, the action I have built adds some sharpening/contrast and the EK Bug. See detail below...
Once you have built an action to your needs, you can use it from Dr. Browns instead of having to open each individual file in Photoshop and apply the action, resize for web and save for the same.
The combination of Dr. Browns and Actions is a deadly one indeed. If you don't use actions, start. They are a huge time saver once you spend the time to build them.
Next let's talk about what it means to be web ready...
Through lot's of trial and error, asking around etc. I have found the following formula to work really well for me...
Jpeg, quality 10 at 72 ppi. sRGB color space and 1000 pixels on the long side. All these options are available for you in the Dr. Brown's 1-2-3 window.
For print-ready try...
Jpeg, quality 12 at 300 ppi. AdobeRGB colorspace and don't constrain the pixel dimensions.
Well that's about it for now. I use the same Dr. Brown's workflow weather I am converting 10 carefully crafted images for a blog post or 200 quickly edited photos for a client. Get on the Dr. Brown's bandwagon and change your life too. Any questions/comments are greatly appreciated and will be answered asap. Sound off in the comments.
~Señior Photographía
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